A review by sherwoodreads
The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. by William Makepeace Thackeray

my modern sense can't help but be squicked by the hero marrying his mother figure, no matter how much Victorian purity and submissiveness she'd attained, but if one sets that aside, it's interesting—especially when Esmond is away from the women. I always find historical novels written by people who are historical from my vantage quite fascinating; Thackeray gets deeply into custom of the late 1600s and early 1700s, making careless reference to habits that are remote to our time, unless one has read a great deal, and his predictions of who would remain in collective memory are quite interesting as well, underscoring his Victorian views. (The 'good' women are firmly Victorian, the bad very much like women of the time, which is perpetrated by modern writers often enough.) In short, the use of history is more interesting than the story, which does get tedious.